Heart’s Content     

Things will get worse before they get better.

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Most reused image on this site besides the lighthouse

Legendary guitarist Eric Johnson has had his website renovated for the new year. It’s much better than the old site, and includes an audio section where you can sample song clips from each of his albums.

Unfortunately none of his recently announced tour dates bring him anywhere near Seattle. Unless I can get a vacation and a ticket to California, this will remain the closest I’ve gotten to seeing him live.

I stopped watching Nabari at about episode 13 when Funimation and D-Rights told people to stop fansubbing it. And now look what happened. I am so annoyed by this new opportunity to support J.C.Staff by buying one of the series I most enjoyed this past year.

In other news, my New Year’s resolution is to stop being a lolicon. I will no longer visit the sites of Kito, Kiyotaka Haimura, Barasui, Yuji Himukai, POP, Yuki Kagura, Goto-P, and my other former favorite artists. After I finish Miao Diary, my next project will not be a moe-driven vehicle - it will be a fantasy warfare story featuring characters aged 20-40 who actually look their ages, centered on a city-state that has walled itself off from the rest of the world.

Finally, Miao Diary Chapter 3 Part 2 is complete and ready for scanning. I’ll post it as soon as I get back to Seattle.

(Can you tell which statements are true and which are not?)

I’m in Chicago with my parents. I can’t scan or upload stuff here, but I’ll try to get as much of Miao Diary Chapter 3 Part 2 done while I’m here. Merry Christmas to you all. Let’s all wish for peace on earth and good will among all people.

Resembles some of Steven’s posts, but with lower quality photos.

This is unremarkable in the rest of the northern United States (I expect more in Chicago, where I will be next week). But in downtown Seattle, where snow almost never sticks, three inches of snow is enough to shut down the city because we’re not equipped to deal with snow.

Yesterday when it started to snow I went to the store to buy soup and bread. Apparently half the city had the a similar idea because the store was packed.

Of course, there’s not much to do on a day like this except stay inside and draw. I’m done with 5 of the 10 pages of Miao Diary Chapter 3 Part 2. I don’t think I can finish the chapter before leaving for Chicago on Wednesday though.

So I’m working on the 10-page conclusion to Chapter 3, and it’s refreshing, after the technically demanding and much more cinematic Heroes of the Academy City, to not have to ensure the correct perspective of everything. Here’s a preview:

I got an email from he who insists that sisters cry Oniichan now, saying he liked the art of Miao Diary because it gave him Skygirls vibes.

… Skygirls!?

What about this

looks like this?

Anyway, even when drawing the Skygirls in my style, they look nothing like the real Skygirls.

The similarity must be imagined merely because Skygirls is full of lolis and J.C.Staff, and Miao Diary is too.

And just like that, I figured out what to do. I was going to do some of those Ravnica character designs for now and announce which project to continue after the new year, but the proper ending came to me all of a sudden and there’s no time to waste.

I will resume work on Miao Diary immediately. The story will end in Chapter 4, bringing the total number of pages to 100.

And it will be a happy ending for Sixten and Jasmine.

Thanks for your help, everyone.

So Jason Eberle of UG Madness finally replied to my proposal to continue his comic after it ends this month. And the answer was no - he did not want to pass on his creative control, and as the writer, he naturally wanted his story to end the way he wanted it to end. I can understand his decision, but I totally didn’t expect it to turn out this way, even if in retrospect I should’ve seen that there was a fairly big chance of rejection. I was expecting to begin a new life of Magic Cards-related webcomics. I had completely shifted gears into Magic mode, and even had a month’s worth of scripts completed. Serves me right for getting so excited about something that wasn’t a sure thing.

Maybe that’s a good thing, as it would have turned me away from this blog and its readers, in my quest to get a larger audience. And maybe it’s better that I don’t try to take advantage of someone else’s popularity (I’ve done enough taking advantage of Jason Miao as it is). Fellow lolicon Samukun was worried that I would give up lolis for the sake of feeling more like a professional, and I seemed to be on the verge of doing just that. So maybe it’s good that I didn’t get approved.

Now suddenly, I’ve come to a complete stop. I have lots of suspended projects, but I no longer feel like any of them is the one I should be working on next. I’ve considered working on multiple projects at once so I can switch if I get bored, but I’ve found that leads to distractions and a lack of focus. I can’t multitask well enough to run more than one major project at a time. I do make miscellaneous anime and guitar posts every now and then for breaks, which should be good enough.

I’d like to ask for help in deciding what I should be focusing my efforts on for the first four months of 2009.

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Since the original author takes three hours to complete a strip, I gave myself a time budget of five hours for this first strip. Only one person complained about the anime style, so I stuck with it because familiarity grants speed. There are horrible perspective errors and there really is background on the first panel only. Also, I end up coloring outside the lines a lot. But I completed the strip in five hours. When you consider that I have to do two strips per week, that’s a commitment of ten hours per week, so the task is big enough as it is.

Magic the Gathering players will get the jokes, but for those who are unfamiliar with the cards referenced:

And yes, Steve’s true form really is a four-armed wizard with a very strange weapon.

After I stuck my proposal for continuation up on the UG Madness forums, I got called a weeaboo (Japanophile). I (and perhaps 80+ percent of my readership) certainly am a weeaboo, and don’t really mind being called that. But the comment made me remember that the worlds of anime and Magic cards don’t necessarily intersect, and my default drawing style may be pleasing to my readers here but not to the readers of the webcomic I’m proposing to sustain. It’s just like the time I got a comment on an old deviantart post that said I had “destroyed” the characters I was depicting.

Source material:

New, more faithful adaptation:

I guess I wouldn’t be H.C.Staff if people didn’t get on my case for being unfaithful to the source. Now the question is this: can I do two strips a week in this style without dying from moe-deficiency?